Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United Kingdom based Director operating in the Smart Building space. If you think a Director is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Zarir Vakil
Non Executive Director of WRLD
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About : A 3D cloud-based platform of real-world environments to create digital twins.
Zarir Vakil
Non Executive Director of WRLD
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About : A 3D cloud-based platform of real-world environments to create digital twins.
Gregory Dewerpe
Managing Director of A/O PropTech
Gregory is a seasoned real estate and technology investor with over 15 years of experience across I-Banking, real estate and venture, a multi-billion deal-making history, and a deep understanding of the financial markets, real estate and venture capital eco-systems. A/O Proptech has emerged from AMD Capital, a dedicated real estate investment company ( direct real assets, public real estate markets, and venture) also founded by Gregory after he left I-Banking where he started his career a decade earlier, at Credit Suisse and Citigroup, looking after investments, structuring and financing for Sovereign wealth funds and other large institutions. Gregory sits on the board/advisory board of a variety of companies in the tech and Real estate space including amongst others Placemake.io, Plentific, Wildstone, Fornova, Residently, Livelike and Tiger Media. Gregory is a Swiss national, fluent in English, French and Italian; he attended HEC Lausanne University, London School of Economics (Masters) and Harvard Business School. Gregory is passionate about sports, travelling, nutrition/food-tech, cancer research and fighting the destructive long-lasting impact of bullying amongst children and younger generations. Gregory currently lives between London and Berlin.
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About A/O PropTech: Europe’s largest Proptech VC firm investing in technology companies transforming the real estate industry.
Serge Lubensky
Founder | Executive Managing Director of ReTool Ventures
Serge is a geek who enjoys finding pragmatic solutions to difficult problems. Along the way, he managed to become a successful entrepreneur with a track record of starting, growing and selling technology companies. Serge grew up in a family of scientists and artists. Not smart enough to become a scientist and not creative enough to be an artist, Serge chose to pursue a computer engineering degree in his hometown of Minsk strictly to avoid being drafted into the Russian Army during the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan. Serge’s first successful exit, from a failing 70-year old startup called the USSR, occurred in 1988. Fresh off the boat, Serge joined a computer company in Queens, NY, developing software for service contractors. Architecting and supporting a system that businesses relied on allowed Serge to learn the intricacies of the commercial repair and maintenance trades and ways to apply technology to solve real-life challenges for business owners and their field technicians. In the process, Serge and the company’s founder, Steven Gottfried, became friends and business partners and started to formulate plans for their next business venture. In 1999, Steven and Serge founded a cloud-based facilities management platform, ServiceChannel, with the goal of transforming the highly inefficient multi-billion dollar commercial repair and maintenance industry. As with their previous company, which was successfully sold, Steven was the idea generator and a master salesman, while Serge worked behind the scenes as CTO to help ServiceChannel achieve a dominant position in the global facilities management marketplace. In 2016, Serge moved to London to accelerate ServiceChannel’s expansion in Europe. In the summer of 2017, Accel, an elite technology VC firm, invested $54M in ServiceChannel continuing to fuel its growth and allowing Steven and Serge to realize a highly successful exit. Now Steven and Serge run ReTool Ventures, a technology investment firm.
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About Equip ID, ReTool Ventures: ReTool Ventures is a new technology investment firm that seeks to retool the facilities management industry by curating a “digital toolbox”
Reza Nejabati
Co Founder, Director of Zeetta Networks
Reza is currently a Senior Lecturer in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, UK. Prior to moving into academia he worked in project management and network architecture roles with leading telecom vendors. Reza has over fifteen years of experience in the field of telecommunication and computer science and has been actively involved in SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) standardisation. He has made important and pioneering contributions to the research fields of Optical Networking, Software Defined Networking, Network & Data Centre Infrastructure Virtualization, Grid Networking and Large Scale Future Internet Experimentation. He has co-/authored over 150 peer reviewed papers and three SDN standardisation documents.
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About University of Bristol, Zeetta Networks: Zeetta Networks simplifies the monitoring, management and automation of complex ICT networks
Mili Tharakan
Director of Technology of Tilt Textiles
Mili John Tharakan loves all things textile and has been practicing in the field of e-textiles over the last decade. Her interest lies especially in the merging of electronics with textile materials and techniques, creating products that lie at the intersection of textiles and gadgets. A post graduate from Manchester Metropolitan University, Mili has held research positions with the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore and the Smart Textiles Design Lab at the Swedish School of Textiles, researching on various smart and e-textile topics. In 2014, under the mother company Welspun, Mili set up TILT, a company developing Smart Home Textiles for the consumer market with a focus on developing e-textiles solutions for the home. Her current interest lies in understanding and resolving the challenges of scaling e-textiles for production, and designing great smart home textile experiences for the consumers. TILT launched its first products, SpinTales Enchanted Duvet and SpinTales Jungle Rug, during Holiday 2016 in the US.
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About Tilt Textiles: An innovative smart home company
Huw Poppy
Sales Director of Breathing Buildings
Huw joined the team in 2011. Since 1997, he has been designing and developing ventilation, filtration and evaporative air cooling systems for commercial, industrial and domestic building types. Prior to joining Breathing Buildings, Huw specialised specifically in the design of natural ventilation systems and the development of control strategies to ensure the systems operate at their maximum efficiency.
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About Breathing Buildings: Breathing Buildings develops and commercializes low energy e-stack mixing ventilation systems.
James Weston
Founder/Sales Director of Teletower
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About Teletower: Teletower provides alternative to fixed scaffolding, podiums, and other mobile access towers.
Mathieu Bellanger
Technical Director and Co-Founder of Lightricity
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About Lightricity: Lightricity Ltd was founded in 2017 to commercialise its high-efficiency energy harvesting technology.
Les Dawson
Managing Director of UniBlock
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About UniBlock: UniBlock is the sole UK Distributor for Polycrete Insulating Concrete Forms (ICF), now known as Thermal Insulating Modular Systems (TIMS).
Henry Chan
Associate Director of Buro Happold
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About Buro Happold, Future Cities Catapult: Buro Happold is an international, multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy.
